LoCALL: LOcal Linguistic Landscapes for global language education in the school context

"This project: i) describes and tackles the formative needs of teachers to deal with linguistic superdiversity in language education, proposing new methods and collaborative learning tools to overcome those needs; ii) commits to acknowledging the added value of superdiversity in language education, by mapping local Linguistic Landscapes (LL) and discussing them comparatively at an international level; iii) acknowledges the importance of involving youth, especially those with a migrant background, in the active discovery and dissemination processes related to social and lived multilingualism and to their own linguistic repertoires; iv) connects foreign language learning and language awareness through sociolinguistic discussions on language presence, roles and dynamics in broader social contexts, acknowledging languages and the linguistic resources that young people have at their disposal and promoting their integration in teaching practices.LoCALL is a project that sees adolescents and teachers as co-ethnographers and experts of LL in their own environment, according to the following principles: -""linguistic landscapes"" (and also ""schoolscaping"" and ""homescaping"", referring to the visibility of languages at school and at home, respectively) are powerful starting points for valuing the presence of various languages and linguistic resources in (foreign, second, additional or mother) language teaching, favoring the development of multilingual, critical and plurisemiotic literacies (by actively engaging actors on discussions on language hierarchies and linguistic prestige, language comparison and language awareness, and translanguaging in public spaces) and, concomitantly, the development of skills in the languages of the school and the development of linguistic repertoires;-to foster global language education - a cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary education that promotes an identity that is open to linguistic and cultural diversity fostering lifelong learning - it is necessary to bring students’ lifeworld and school multilingualism into (foreign) language teaching in order to develop a sense of belonging through active participation in multilingual and intercultural spaces;-teachers develop a deeper understanding of pupils’ plurilingualism through the joint analysis of the semiotic artifacts produced by their pupils, as well as by other adolescents from partner institutions throughout Europe.Bearing in mind these three principals, LoCALL intends to foster pupils’ engagement and critical skills (“savoir s’engager” in Michael Byram’s terms) by promoting young people’s roles as co-educators and experts: youth take part in the 5 teacher training events by guiding the teachers of the partner schools through their cities and by giving small talks about their discoveries at those events.LoCALL’s principles and aims will be realised through the sequential but interrelated conception of 5 intellectual outputs (IO): i) Situational survey; ii) (Multimodal) modules on LL for language education in the different contexts, aimed at teachers and teacher trainers; iii) Tutorial and podcast library on LL; iv) App for mobile learning, including several functions; and v) Guidelines for the introduction of linguistic landscapes in (foreign) language learning and teacher education. All these IOs will be available on the project platform, which will include tools for telecollaboration across schools and partners (synchronous and asynchronous communication tools)."